Apparent agreement in a room is often shallow: everyone nods while privately holding different mental models of what was just agreed (McCarthy and Appel illustrate this with a cartoon of nodding people whose thought bubbles show different shapes). "Mining for conflict" is the practice of actively probing for hidden disagreement rather than accepting silence or nodding as true consensus — asking pointed follow-up questions, inviting dissent explicitly, and treating a too-quiet room as a signal to dig further, not a sign of alignment.
Pairs with Live Polling for Provisional, Context-Dependent Decisions (e.g., Fist of Five) as a lightweight mechanism for surfacing the same hidden disagreement, and with Alignment Decays Over Time since undetected shallow consensus is one of the ways alignment quietly erodes.
Borrowed from Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: the discipline of deliberately surfacing disagreement people are reluctant to voice in a group, rather than assuming silence means alignment. In stakeholder contexts (McCarthy & Appel, Align), this means actively probing the edges of a group discussion, or following up one-on-one with quiet attendees, before assuming a room has truly aligned. Pairs with Shuttle Diplomacy for surfacing what people won't say in the room, and with Fist of Five for detecting the same silent disagreement numerically.
A CTO gave full public agreement on four quarterly OKRs — a Fist of Five check with all 4s and 5s — then privately crossed two of them off his own team's plan the next morning. The group-level confidence check didn't lie about the room's mood, but it also didn't surface a real private disagreement; only one-on-one follow-up (Shuttle Diplomacy) would have caught it before it cost a quarter. From Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel's Align.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust